


Leavetaking

by cruisedirector



Category: Star Trek: Voyager
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Character Death, Epistolary, F/M, Friendship, Grief/Mourning, Holodeck, Homecoming, Letters, Past Relationship(s), Unrequited Love, Virtual Reality
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 1996-12-20
Updated: 1996-12-20
Packaged: 2017-10-04 22:57:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,583
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/35001
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cruisedirector/pseuds/cruisedirector
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After decades of travel, Voyager is home, and Chakotay has one more person to say goodbye to.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Leavetaking

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to LRBowen and Lauawill for beta and suggestions.

"That's pretty much everything," Paris sighed, looking around the bridge. "The shuttle's waiting. I, uh, asked for the privilege of piloting you in. We can take off whenever you're ready."

Chakotay was surprised by Tom's gallantry. In all these years, he and Paris had never become close friends, but they had drifted into the comfortable companionship of people used to being together for hours a day. Yet much as he hated to let the younger man down, Chakotay had one thing more to do before he left Voyager.

"I really appreciate your waiting for me, Tom. But there's a piece of business I still need to attend to."

Paris looked at him as if he would say something, then bit his lip and turned away. "I understand, Commander."

"Go on without me, Paris," Chakotay said.

* * * *

He pressed the panel a few times, engaged the privacy protocol, and entered the grid-lined room. She was standing with her back to him, hands on her hips, staring into the darkness where the generator lay.

"Captain," he said heavily.

Relaxing her arms, she turned to gaze at him in curiosity. "It's been a long time. More than a month, the computer tells me."

"Well, I'm finally off duty." The faint hint of a smile quirked the corners of his lips. "We're home."

"Home?!" Animation lit her features.

"We're in spacedock. I'm on my way down to Federation HQ. In a few hours, Starfleet is going to restore my official commission and promote me to my acting rank."

"We'll be equals, then," she smiled back, putting a hand on his arm.

"No, we won't. I'm going to resign."

"Why?"

"I don't want to work for the system anymore."

A look of disquiet flickered across her face. "Why not wait a few weeks? Go visit your people, see how things have changed. Surely there isn't a Maquis any longer..."

"You're right," he interrupted. "But I've given enough of my life to Starfleet. I'm thinking about going to Vulcan, to study with their spiritual masters. Tuvok said I'm welcome to stay with his family for as long as I like."

Crossing her arms over her chest, she shook her head, regarding the floor. Her chin lowered, her eyes turned up like beacons to his face. "You can't bury yourself behind Vulcan discipline, Commander."

"Call me Chakotay. I won't be 'Commander' much longer." He felt himself growing unreasonably angry with her. "And Tuvok and I have been friends for a long time now."

The blue eyes snapped sharply at him. "Tuvok's back where he belongs, Chakotay. And so are you. You should have deleted this program a long time ago."

It hurt fiercely to hear her say it; his nostrils flared as his eyes began to sting. Honest to the last--or, after all these years, had she grown more so, because he needed her to be that way? He would never know for sure.

"I came to tell you..."

The word stuck in his throat. He remembered vividly the last time she had said it to him. Rolling her eyes as she ran down a litany of things for him to do while she was away from Voyager--he had had several questions, but she had been in a hurry to complete the mission, she had waved them away, squeezing his shoulder as she stepped onto the platform. "Just take care of the ship while I'm gone," she said as she put her hands on her hips, waiting. Then an odd grin crooked her mouth, and she added, "Goodbye, Commander." Her form had shimmered away, still smiling at him. And then the panel exploding, sparks flying from the transporter console...

"You don't need to say goodbye to a holographic simulation." Her voice, unchanged, jerked him back to the present. She paused, and her expression softened. "She's been dead for more than thirty years, Chakotay."

"Believe me, I know that." He felt like an adolescent being lectured by an adult, humiliation on top of the anguish. "Why are you telling me now?"

"Because you need to remember it, now of all times. You've been dragging her around with you for half your life, and that's too long. She didn't expect that from the people she left at home in the first place. If she were here now, you'd still be going your separate ways."

Chakotay looked into the incandescent eyes of the ageless woman before him. "You have no way of knowing that," he said through his teeth.

It had taken him more than a year to figure out how to upload her empty transporter pattern into the hologenerator. After months of replaying her logs, her mission records, her personnel reports--programming every detail he could remember, or eke out of anyone else during early-morning conversations--he thought he'd done his job too well. He could not shake the feeling of being an impostor in her chair. Losing her had stripped him of the confidence that they would persevere; he'd needed her optimism, her determination, so he'd retained those qualities in a projection of her. Now he knew that in doing so, he had placed them permanently outside himself.

Yet the reproduction was woefully incomplete. She was programmed to react like his captain, so she touched him when she wanted his attention, she fretted about his concerns for the ship. But he had no access to her apart from their roles and the endless details that had kept them distanced when he served beside her. The hidden thoughts and memories of her original, the secret fears and desires, the delicate thread of spirit could not be duplicated. In everything she'd left behind, the captain had said scarcely a word about her inner life--and he'd seen her personal logs, he'd decoded and read her encrypted files--he'd behaved shamelessly in the weeks after they had lost her. Her command frustrations were wryly reported in the transcripts. But he'd thought that her private files might give him some access to her vulnerabilities, a sentimental side she kept buried under the focused exterior.

Yet she rarely talked about home, not even the man she'd left there--she got nostalgic about her dog as often as she did her parents. And although she praised her first officer, ruminated about him, griped about his shortcomings, expressed relief when he survived crises, there was only one mention of himself that really caught his attention--a short, cryptic log entry, made just after that Romulan who'd come through a wormhole from the Alpha Quadrant and the past had left with their messages home. "I told my parents not to worry about me, this is what I chose," she'd said with a shaky smile, not quite looking into the screen as she spoke. "I told Starfleet what was happening out here with the crew. I told Mark...to live his life. Oh, and I told him more than I should have about Chakotay, but I owe him that much."

Told him what? The question kept him awake at night for years. Did she tell her lover not to worry because she could take care of her ship even with a renegade second-in-command, or did she warn him that she expected the Maquis leader to try to mutiny and ditch her on the far side of the galaxy? Even if she meant what Chakotay desperately wanted to believe, what did it change, if she had kept that secret from him until it was too late? Which one of them did she think she owed the truth?

The fact that he no longer owed her anything himself brought him no comfort. There had been times when he let weeks pass without looking at this program; days would go by when he did not think of her at all. But always he would enter his ready room and expect for a moment to see her behind the desk, or, striding onto the bridge, he would move automatically toward the chair that was occupied most recently by Tuvok. And then her absence would crush him anew, he couldn't stand it, he had to see her one more time.

"Why don't you reprogram me at least?" she asked in a tone of vague, rational annoyance. "This version obviously hasn't gotten you anywhere."

"On the contrary. It's gotten me home."

"Then bring it up to date. What do you think I'd look like at eighty? Not like this." She spread her arms to indicate her erect carriage, her shining hair. "What you should have done with my pattern was to produce a body and hold a funeral. Then you might have been able to let go."

Vanished into thin air. Intolerable. He knew as much about transporter technology as anyone who served under him; for weeks after the accident he had read every manual, forcing himself to believe that if they pressed the right button, she would simply rematerialize. He'd had Kim and Torres working late into the night on the circuitry, he would not permit anyone else to touch the console where her pattern was imprinted. B'Elanna wondered aloud whether he wasn't putting on a show for the crew, to demonstrate that he'd tried absolutely everything to retrieve the captain before assuming command. Then, when he stopped speaking to the chief engineer, she had gotten worried about him. "Chakotay, even if you could find some way of bringing enough matter into the pattern buffer to rematerialize her body, it wouldn't be her. There isn't any synaptic function in the pattern. Her--soul, or whatever you want to call it--is gone."

Harry had worked silently with him, probably knowing all along that it was hopeless but understanding Chakotay's need to try. Once, the ensign had tried to remember something the captain had said to him about his own near-death experience, but Chakotay cut him off; he didn't want to talk about death. Later he was sorry he hadn't let Kim finish. Of all the things Chakotay needed to know about his captain, her beliefs about the afterlife should have been the most important. In all these decades of questing, he had never been able to reach her spirit.

* * * *

The door behind him opened. He whirled around, wondering who in hell would have overridden his privacy lockout.

An old man who looked vaguely familiar entered, walking slowly. Through his fury, Chakotay tried to place him: Someone from Starfleet Command? Someone he knew in the Maquis, a lifetime ago? The man did not even meet his eyes; he stared right past Chakotay in horror, straight at the image, which lifted her head to look blankly back at him.

"Computer, end program," the stranger croaked.

The onetime terrorist leader strangled a shout as she flickered and vanished. Had the intruder been any younger, his life would have been in danger. "What the hell do you..."

"Commander, allow me to introduce myself." The man turned. "Mr. Tuvok let me on board your ship. My name is Mark Johnson. I was..."

Chakotay had taken an instinctive step back at the name. "I know who you are." Suddenly he recognized the face: he'd seen it in photos he'd carefully packed away, the happy couple dressed up at official functions, on the beach with her hair down--he'd resolutely ignored Mark, trying instead to envision the scene without the man. Earlier that week when he personally took the captain's belongings out of storage, where they had remained for years next to boxes marked "Stadi" and "Durst" and "Seska," it had never occurred to Chakotay that there might still be someone who would come forward to claim them.

"What do you want? How did you find Tuvok, anyway?" he demanded in the tone of an accusation.

"Tuvok found me." Mark kept his gaze level. "He thought you might want to talk about Kathryn."

The name hit Chakotay like a blow. Spinning around, he faced the far wall to stop himself from striking back physically. "The dogsitter," he spat contemptuously.

To his astonishment, the stranger laughed. "The dogsitter. I still am. I've raised many litters descended from her dog. The puppies used to wake me up, right after she disappeared. I'd feel something against my side and think she was with me. Then I'd start to say her name, and remember that the puppies couldn't exist in the same memory with her." Chakotay wavered between fury and empathy. "At first I couldn't stand to change anything--as if by keeping things exactly as they were, I might be able to stop time from passing. But the puppies ruined that. Five new lives that she would never see. You know, all the shedding used to bother me...but later it made me feel better to come home and find fuzz covering the carpets."

Mark paced a few steps, suddenly oblivious to Chakotay's presence. "I had a message from Admiral Necheyev. Incapable of sincerity, that woman." A name out of the distant past, Chakotay vaguely remembered a pointed face--suspicious, angry-- insincere. "'I regret to have to tell you. No trace from the warp core. Two search missions failed. We have no plans for further investigation.'" A flicker of anger colored the stranger's face as he turned back. "I contacted Admiral Paris at headquarters. Kathryn had taken his son on the mission, but I guess you know that. Paris thought she might have thrown in her lot with the Maquis. Ridiculous man--and she served under him for years--but, then, he felt that if his own son could betray him, so could she. I went to Deep Space Nine to see Commander Sisko. He talked to a Gul he knew, to make sure the Cardassians didn't have the ship, but he couldn't do much else. So just like that, she was gone...no funeral, no fight, just...nothing."

How much had Tuvok told him about the transporter accident? Chakotay drew a sharp breath as Mark looked away. "I was never sure I'd be able to hold on to her anyway. She would have been a different person if domesticity had been uppermost in her mind." Wistfully, he shook his head. "Instead I have three generations of her dogs living in my house, and my daughters each have a puppy from the latest litter."

"Your daughters!"

The old man smiled directly at him, and Chakotay realized that Mark might be thinking of him as "the old man" as well: he was probably only a few years younger. "One's an astrophysicist and one's a physician. My wife's a veterinarian, I married a woman who'd never traveled outside this system. Met her because of Kathryn's dog, in fact. I think Kathryn would have liked her--she's bright and organized and doesn't mind having a dog licking her face at four in the morning."

Chakotay was reeling from conflicting emotions--relief that this man wasn't here to steal the past from him, loathing that Mark had put personal memories aside decades ago while he himself had lived on recordings and speculation. "Don't judge me too quickly, Commander," Mark said quietly. "For years I had no idea whether she was alive or dead. It made sense that she had died along with everyone else on the ship. Tuvok's family assumed that he was gone, they permitted his wife to take another mate. I thought it would be easier to learn that she was dead than to be left not knowing."

"No, it wouldn't." Nothing Chakotay had done in all his years on Voyager had been as difficult as filling out Kathryn Janeway's death certificate--not saying goodbye to Ensign Kim when he elected to remain on a planet in the Delta Quadrant, not losing six crewmembers and a shuttle to the Vidiians, not giving the service at Kes' funeral. Regardless of what some of his crew thought, he had never had designs on the captaincy of Voyager. He liked being First Officer, and if everyone in Starfleet thought the way Janeway did, he would never have left. They had built on the instinctive trust and rapport they'd shared from the start, he took her nearness for granted even when responsibility and protocol kept her from letting him offer her anything more.

When the transporter misfired, he attributed his initial desperation to the pressures of command, plus the fear that without Janeway to hold them together, the crew might factionalize. Later he knew it was loneliness. He missed having her to talk to on the bridge while the alien stars crept by, the way she touched him, her invitations to consult over meals that he forgot to eat otherwise. He found he'd internalized her concerns about fraternizing with the junior officers. In her absence he longed for her consumingly, while he worked and rested and particularly when he couldn't sleep. He even logged messages to give to her when they eventually got her back.

Finally they had to take the entire transporter system offline to repower the failing replicators. He resisted for days, and it took the combined insistence of Torres, Tuvok, Carey, and Kim to change his mind. Faced down by the senior staff, he downloaded her pattern and shut off the console himself. Afterwards he walked slowly to the ready room, carrying all that was left of Captain Kathryn Janeway on a small chip.

Goodbye, Commander.

Just take care of the ship while I'm gone.

He sat at her desk, in her chair, imagining that he could still feel the imprint of her body. Kes had continued to bring flowers from the hydroponics bay, so the air was fragrant; the scent reminded him of Kathryn so strongly that he felt as if she were hiding in the room. When he punched up the forms that would legally end her life, he became so nauseous that he had to lie down.

On her couch, surrounded by her belongings, meditation was hopeless; trance eluded him. He held the chip so tightly that it cut into his fingers. He considered idly that if he pressed down hard with it, the sharp metal edge would probably gash his wrists deeply enough to free his spirit from his body, sending him to wherever she was. The barren hole inside him was unlike anything he'd ever experienced, not even when he saw the first pictures of what the Cardassians had done to his planet--this was nothing that could be fought, yet had to be endured for the rest of his life.

Just take care of the ship while I'm gone.

Goodbye, Commander.

He rose to pace the room until he was dizzy, avoiding the desk and her chair, hurling the padds against the windows, hitting his head into the walls. Finally he grew too exhausted to stand. He collapsed on the floor, sobbing her name, lost to the anguish that overcame him.

Almost a day later, Tuvok had gotten concerned enough to override the ready room privacy codes. He barged in, looked around the wreckage, found Voyager's acting captain slumped in a pool of grief. Sat down beside him for several minutes, face like stone. And then began to talk. Not about the ship or his duty, but about Kathryn, whom Tuvok had known better than anyone else on the ship. How they met, how he came to serve her, how unworthy he felt when she called him her counsel.

Chakotay had listened silently, cradling the data chip, surprised that the Vulcan would indulge his feelings and even more surprised at the depth of Tuvok's esteem for their captain. He thought about how painful it must be for a Vulcan to deal with a human in such an emotional state, and only months later did he realize that his own unrestrained mourning had gotten Tuvok off the hook: the Vulcan had shared his sorrow without having to express it. The mutual loss forged an abiding bond which replaced the tension that had hovered between them while they served under her. The crew responded to the shift in command more easily than might have been expected, largely because of the unquestioned allegiance that Tuvok offered.

Tom Paris had given the eulogy at the brief memorial service. The lieutenant seemed nearly as devastated by the captain's loss as Chakotay; she had been his mentor and his model, the one person in his life to give him unqualified confidence. Paris coped with his grief by escaping to his holodeck retreats whenever he could. It would probably not have surprised Tom to learn that his commanding officer had a private program wearing Kathryn Janeway's face... recoiling, Chakotay realized abruptly what Paris would assume if he knew about that.

He forced his mind back to the present, to his patient visitor. "That image," he began with difficulty, nodding at the air where it had disappeared. "It's not what you think. I would never have used her for--"

Mark raised his hand to cut him off. "You don't have to explain anything to me." He reached into a pocket and pulled out a computer chip, causing Chakotay to shudder involuntarily. "You've seen this before, Commander," the other man said comfortingly. "It's the messages your crew sent twenty years into your own past. They didn't reach us for more than a decade after they were meant to, but they caught up finally. I thought you might want to see some of them."

Chakotay found that he couldn't step forward, couldn't swallow, couldn't even take the chip he so desperately wanted. "She said..." he rasped out. "She said in her logs that she told you..."

Mark lifted Chakotay's hand and pressed the chip into it, closing his fingers around it. "It might be too little, too late. Or it might be too much, I don't know. But your friends out there--Tuvok, and that man waiting by the shuttle who told me where to find you--they're very worried about you, Commander."

As Mark turned to go, gratitude belatedly arrived. "Are you going to beam down?" Chakotay asked hoarsely.

"I'll be at headquarters when you arrive." Mark left the room quietly, leaving the Voyager's commander standing with the computer chip clenched in his fist.

* * * *

Chakotay waited several minutes, then walked slowly to the exit and down the corridors of the ship. He had never really thought of it as his ship, but as he moved toward the bridge, he knew every inch of it--the changes they had made in the past many years, the rooms altered as the crew planted gardens and had families and became almost domesticated out in space. How frightening it must be for their long-lost families to meet the strangers they had become. He had contacted no one yet; he had no idea where "home" to his people might be now.

The turbolift swished open and took him to the top of the ship, where the computer still worked. He inserted the chip, found the entry he was looking for, put it on the main viewer.

The sight of Captain Kathryn Janeway's face knocked the breath out of him. She looked different than he'd seen her these past many years, more emotional than in any of the logs and simulations; her hair was in the tight bun she'd worn when he first met her, not the looser one she'd favored later on, and the strain of little sleep showed on her face. Her voice was different too, tight with regret and longing; she spoke quickly, as if afraid of wasting space.

She had left several messages. One for her parents, telling them that she was exploring the unknown as they always taught her to do, they shouldn't worry about her, she missed them, but the crew was keeping her busy and Tuvok and her new first officer were keeping her sane. Another for a science professor at the Academy who had apparently been a mentor, telling him among other things that he never should have flunked B'Elanna Torres. Another for the designers of the bioneural circuitry and the holodoctor, short and terse--she was aware that the Romulans might screen the recordings.

Then a message for Starfleet Command, mostly the details of the incident that had brought them to the quadrant. He braced himself to hear her tell them about his demolished ship, his crew, anything she had gleaned from him that might serve Starfleet's interests, and was surprised instead to hear her say, "Gentlemen, I know you're hoping to get a report from me about the Maquis. I can't help but feel that it would be a grave violation of my crew's trust in me to discuss what we've learned from them, and I intend to tell Lieutenant Tuvok not to pass on what he observed during his surveillance mission. I realize that this may affect the balance of power in the Alpha Quadrant, but I have confidence that Starfleet will do very well dealing with the insurgence without us. I want to tell you that these renegades I was sent to apprehend are some of the most loyal, committed individuals I have ever had the honor of serving with. And I realize that perhaps it's easy for me to say this--seventy thousand light years from the site of the carnage if war should break out in the Demilitarized Zone-- but I've been rethinking the wisdom of Starfleet's decisions, and I hope you will consider carefully our obligation to the settlers."

Janeway was wearing the same grim, determined expression that her holoimage had faced him with earlier, but there was a light behind her eyes that he'd almost forgotten--the expression of pleasure she got from believing that she was doing the right thing, like when she had destroyed the array, refused the Sikarian trajector, left Earhart and the 37s behind. She added, "In case I should not make it back with my crew, I have a few additional requests. I insist that all charges against my Maquis crewmembers be dropped, regardless of the situation when they arrive in the Alpha Quadrant. It seems clear that Commander Chakotay's rank should be formally reinstated, and I recommend him highly for decoration for service to this vessel and its crew. He is the finest second in command I've ever served with, his loyalty has been more unswerving than some of my own officers'. Oh, and Admiral Paris...I wanted you to know that I've given your son a field promotion, he's become a fine helm officer. And he takes orders a damn sight better than I did at his age." Her eyes sparkled gleefully as she reached to end the recording.

A moment of darkness, then she appeared again. Her hair was down, she was wearing a pink nightgown--he could only see her upper body, her shoulders bare under the tresses--Chakotay cursed himself momentarily for not making a copy of the messages, and immediately cursed himself again for considering it. "Mark," she was saying throatily. "By the time you see this recording, I'm sure someone will have filled you in on where it came from, and how, and why." She looked away and swallowed hard before continuing. "There are a lot of things I should say to you, and not a lot of time. The most important one is, I love you and I cherish the memories of our life together. I am committed to getting this ship home, and I have every intention of seeing you again someday. But I can't afford to daydream about our old life any more than you can afford to wait for me. I wish you every happiness. And don't worry about me. My first officer is taking care of the crew for me, like you must be with the puppies. You'd like him, Mark, sometimes he reminds me of you. Same smart-ass sense of humor, and same committment to hard- luck causes." She pressed her fingers to her lips, then to the screen, blocking her own face, and it went blank again.

Chakotay did not realize that tears were rolling down his face until he moved to end the messages and found that he couldn't see in front of him. He pressed a button, retrieved the chip, and then retreated to the chair in the center of the bridge that had belonged to both of them. He'd recreated her form and manner, imbued it with as much essence as he could summon, but the holographic construct only made him more aware of the absence it represented. He felt her living presence now as he had in those first days after the accident, just outside his realm of being. Had he chained her spirit to this ship, prevented it from moving on? Or was it his own spirit that he had chained?

He was going to have to find Mark, down at HQ, to give him back the chip before the debriefing. What a generous man. If only he had something to offer in return...but Mark wouldn't need her old photos or logs, he had a family.

What did _he_ have?

Back to the turbolift, to deck six. Chakotay stood outside the doors of the holodeck for a long time. Finally he entered the necessary commands and passed through the gate to unreality. She was standing exactly where she'd been when Mark made her disappear, her expression neutral.

"I'm going to delete this program," he said. And then didn't. Moments passed.

"Just say the words. It might be more of a relief than you want to admit." She smiled wryly. "I'm not sentient, you know. I only seem that way to you because you programmed me that way. Right now you're hearing a combination of Janeway's logs and the ship's computer, and yourself. Listen to yourself, Chakotay."

Himself. Should he give Janeway the credit for their homecoming, or himself and this soulless monster he'd created? After all these years, he'd brought her ship in, his idealized image of her the beacon that lit his way home--driving all distractions from his mind, keeping him focused on the crew he'd sworn to protect in her place.

The task was complete now. He could walk to the transporter room and dematerialize himself, going out as she had in a shower of light. He regarded the holoimage, which stood still and silent, not quite looking at him. Not quite there. Kathryn Janeway had said all she had to say to him in this form.

His eyes closed and he reached for her presence inwardly, his spirit moving, searching beyond the grief, beyond the anger.

Finding. There in the ship and in himself. Always. All this time.

"Computer, delete program," he said aloud.

* * * *

Tom was still waiting, resting on the floor of the shuttle bay against some storage containers. Chakotay was surprised to see Tuvok there as well. "I thought you might require assistance," the Vulcan reported dispassionately.

"Yeah. I think you should do the flying, Tuvok." The Vulcan lifted an eyebrow at Paris, who grinned craftily. "Just so Chakotay and I don't crash into Federation HQ. You know, we were suspected enemies of the Federation when we left. They'll never let you two get to Vulcan if you don't convince them that we're on their side now."

"I'm not going to Vulcan." Chakotay spoke quietly, to Tuvok, who nodded understanding. The first thing he wanted to do was to find Mark, thank him properly, and ask him about Kathryn Janeway--the real one, whom he'd all but forgotten. And then he was going to accept that damn captaincy.

"I hate to leave this ship," Paris sighed. "I always felt like--well, it's not logical, Tuvok, but I always felt like Janeway was still here, watching over us somehow. Don't get upset, Chakotay, I don't mean you weren't a fine commanding officer..."

"I understand exactly what you mean." Chakotay looked at Paris and a decision began to form in his mind. "I hear that they're going to promote me. That ought to give me at least a little clout in Starfleet, don't you think?" Paris and Tuvok both looked startled as Chakotay stopped to consider.

For the first time, he felt that the ship was his. Still full of memories, and probably a relic by modern standards, but Janeway had given it to him when she made him her second-in-command. Returning the sacrifice he made for her--his own ship, all those years ago. Of course she had believed him capable of getting Voyager home; otherwise she would never have entrusted it into his hands.

"What'd you have in mind?" Tom said finally.

"I've been thinking--it's probably good that they stripped out all the refurbishments we made while we were off in space. But everything still works, and it wouldn't be that hard to refit the engines. I don't like what they're doing one bit, decommissioning Voyager. She deserves better than that."

Tuvok raised an eyebrow. "By 'she,' are you referring to Captain Janeway?" he asked.

"I'm referring to her ship. My ship," he corrected himself.

"So..." Paris made a gesture for Chakotay to continue.

"So, if I get to choose my own command, are you interested in sitting in the next chair? We know things none of those bureaucrats at HQ have a handle on. This assuming that they'll let a couple of old men crap around the quadrant."

Paris laughed in surprise, at Chakotay and at Tuvok's almost-disgusted expression. The three men boarded the shuttle for Earth.


End file.
